


Origin Stories

by soaringrachel



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: Gen, Genderbending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 14:11:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soaringrachel/pseuds/soaringrachel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avengers, growing up as women (or in one case, as a man).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Origin Stories

**Author's Note:**

> First of all: warning for depression and for mention of suicide.
> 
> Secondly: Thor, in this story, believes herself to be and identifies as a boy during childhood, and after discovering she has a typically female body identifies as a woman as a teenager and adult. I sincerely hope I haven't been insensitive to or misrepresenting of the trans* community in any way here; if I have been please let me know.
> 
> Thirdly: if the ending feels rushed it's, ah, because it is. I started nano today and decided to get this story up, as after another month without finishing it I knew it'd be done, and I liked what I had.

**1\. (a rose by any other name)**

Years from now, when they fan the papers out in front of Cat Barton and tell her that the mark is Nikolai Romanov, they will add that he prefers to be known as the Spider. But at fifteen, still seeing the Red Rooms even with his eyes open, Nikolai identifies more specifically with the black widow.

The deadly bite, the black with a neat spot of red. The way she symbolizes sex gone poisonous, the way she’s death in a package expected because it is unexpected. He is, of course, fifteen, and then older but caught up in the pissing contest of competitive espionage; even if they’d let him he wouldn’t really want a woman’s name for his moniker. But when they tell Cat Barton to shoot down the Spider, the man she doesn’t kill is the Black Widow.

 

On the birth certificates, dated ten days apart (July fourth and fourteenth, Brooklyn, New York, nineteen-eighteen), they are Sarah Rogers and Jane Barnes, one baby face smiling beatifically while the other screws itself up and screams.

By the time they are four, they are nothing but Sadie and Bucky, two scrappers made of ponytails with hair falling out and not-quite-finished glasses of milk and, one secret day when they are eight, a single drop of each other’s blood. Sadie’s blond locks fall in blue eyes and block the view of her too-thin face; Bucky’s wild dark curls spiral down her back in a way that makes the better class of boys flock to her once they are teenagers. She always makes sure to save one for Sadie, but Sadie bows out. She knows she’s nobody’s idea of a dream date, all elbows and heavy breathing.

They aren’t tomboys, exactly, but they get in fights more than they maybe should (because when Sadie sees a bully she doesn’t care that she’s five foot one, a hundred pounds, and a girl to boot, and when Bucky sees Sadie in trouble she doesn’t care about  _anything_ ), and they swear like men when the Dodgers lose, and of course there’s the whole thing with Sadie and the army.

 

She comes to the circus Cathleen Barton, a tall girl in bearing if not in height, with that tall-girl attitude that doesn’t give much of a shit what anyone thinks, and doesn’t give much of a shit for herself either.

She’s young enough she could learn to do anything, and be good enough for this circus; it’s just damned luck that they hand her a bow and turn her towards a target, and sometimes when Cat’s in a bad mood she thinks it’s the only luck she ever had.

Of course, this is neglecting the luck that she found her name, that crazy Nick who watched the horses shortened it to  _Cat_ even before she started finding improbable places to climb to with no real care for coming down, before she adopted as her own the nasty yellow bastard of a cat that followed the circus around, before she realized she was gonna be a soldier and a spy and  _Cathleen_  just wasn’t going to cut it.

 

There are no good nicknames for Bridget.

Bridie, that’s the best anyone can think of, even when she looks in the big Name Encyclopedia, and skinny, brown-haired eleven-year-old Bridget Banner, tortoiseshell glasses slipping down her nose into the huge book on her lap, is no one’s idea of a white wedding.

Other girls her age are named  _Allison_ or  _Jen_ , and Bridget envies them, strong girls who always get the volleyball over the net and don’t have circles under their eyes from reading Curie biographies. Other girls her age have charm bracelets and slumber parties and swim dozens of laps at the local pool that summer, while Bridget sits on the edge pretending to read and watching them.

But there are no nicknames for Bridget, and no way to hide that Bridget Banner is not other girls her age.

 

Until Thor of Asgard is fourteen, no one but her mother and father know she is not a boy.

Well, Loki knows. But Loki finds everything out at some point, the second daughter allowed to be a woman, and actually good at it, or good at the air of secrets that Thor associates with women, before the day when she is fourteen when Loki perches on the edge of his—her—bath and tells her that she is one.

It takes her an embarrassingly long time to catch on, as it always does when she talks to Loki, who only confuses her.

“You’re not my brother,” Loki starts out, and Thor protests, because even though at fourteen he is not as stupid as he looks, even though he has noticed like everyone else has that neither Odin nor Frigga had black hair even in youth, he knows that will never be true.

“Ah, but you’re my sister,” Loki says, fully dressed when Thor isn’t and leaving him at an injurious disadvantage. But he knows  _that_ isn’t true, given that he’s not a woman, and says as much. Loki has none of it, and Thor wrinkles his brow, says, “I fight, don’t I?”

“Women can fight,” says Loki, and later Thor will be sure she heard the pain in those words, but at the moment he only has ears for the explanation, for Loki’s telling him that usually, it’s decided by what’s under the clothes rather than what one’s wearing.

Odin is lucky; his daughter-son grows into a hard-featured face, and breasts are easy to hide behind armor. But when Thor is sixteen, the rumors begin, and finally she tells Loki to go ahead and whisper in the right ears to put the truth in the air.

 

Harriet Stark names her daughter Antonia so she can take a man’s name as Harry does, claim  _Tony_  and make the world her own.

Instead she calls herself Tonia and decides to make the world her own anyway.

Harry Stark wears her hair in a smart pageboy cut, smokes a pipe and wears men’s suits to business meetings.

Tonia Stark never smokes in her life, and the first business meeting she goes to she is still in her red dress from the night before, one shoulder torn slightly and sewn up in the elevator, needle pulled from Tonia’s bra and thread cut between her teeth as the doors open.

Tonia goes away to college far too young (and she can see the look of surprise in Harry’s eyes every day she’s there), but even far too young she drinks and fucks around and grows brilliant, machines coming apart in her mind and then under her greasy hands, dark, dark hair tied up in a thick dark knot that she lets out longer and longer every night.

  **2.** **(mild-mannered alter ego)**

The person whose hand Cat reluctantly shakes is every inch a G-man, except for being a woman.

“Let’s see what you can do,” she says, and Cat shoots the rifle like everything depends on it, which it does—because the Army wasn’t ready for Cat Barton, and whoever this Agent Coulson works for just might be (gotta be the FBI, with shoes like those, but then again why wouldn’t she say so?)

“Mm-hmm,” Coulson says. “Farther.”

Cat shoots from farther, and then, when Coulson calls it, farther. She can do a little trick-shooting, too, nothing like with her bow, but enough that Coulson twists her pearl-peach mouth and mutters “One of  _those_ ” under her breath. Cat doesn’t hear her, but she reads her lips, and she can’t stop her chuckle before it’s out of her mouth and Coulson’s raising her eyebrows.

“All right, showgirl,” Coulson says, “now show me what you can  _really_  do,” and Cat grins, tells her what she needs.

Coulson doesn’t call her showgirl again. (That point’s made plenty clear by the role she has to put on for her training mission in Nevada.)

 

Tonia meets her first friend after college, after she takes over the company but before  _Stark_  means  _Tonia_  to America. Jessica Rhodes is tall and buttoned-up and wants to be a general; Tonia Stark is shorter than ever she lets herself stand and out of her red dresses in the space of a wink and never says she wants to be a genius because that would imply she wasn’t already.

Strong emotion is perhaps inevitable.

At first Tonia calls her Jessica and decides that she’s in love with her, swears off boys for two weeks to impress her, puts together secrecy provisions that actually do. It is, in fact, the measures Tonia puts in place to ensure that Jessica’s generalship will not be in danger in the event of lesbian sex that begin their working relationship. They do not, however, begin actual lesbian sex, because Jessica isn’t into girls, and neither, as she finally admits to herself, is Tonia. (It would’ve been  _so good_  for annoying her mother. But she isn’t.)

So second Tonia calls her Jess and decides she hates her, but Jess is having none of that, Jess never will put up with Tonia’s shit, and they skip very quickly to third, which is Tonia tossing an arm around her best buddy Rhodey and walking off into the sunset. (Or, you know, into the wonderful world of arms dealing. They do have being shady in common.)

 

Sadie’s dad was in the army.

That’s where it starts, Sadie’s crazy idea that she’s going to be a soldier, but if that were all it was she’d have gotten over it. If the war’d never started she’d have gotten over it, but when Hitler shows up and he’s the biggest bully of them all Sadie knows she’s got to be there to stop him, all skinny five foot one of her.

It doesn’t help that Bucky likes the idea, thinks she’d like to be a soldier too (if more for the glory and the chance to shoot a gun than Sadie’s noble ideals), but unlike Sadie, she’s willing not to be one, willing to flirt with the boys as they leave and find a job making bombs once they’re gone.

Not Sadie. For one thing, the factory won’t have her (not strong enough, they say. And she’s allergic to something they use), and for another, what Bucky’s doing may be helping the war effort, but Sadie’s got an urge to punch Hitler in his mean old face.

When Bucky comes home one evening to find her friend’s ponytail shorn off, she doesn’t even try to talk her out of it. By that time, it’s past that point.

Of course, they find her out every time. Every time until that one last time when Dr. Anna Erskine (a lady scientist, Sadie thinks, so maybe there’s some hope to be a lady soldier) tells her she’s got a very special offer, and she thinks Sadie may be the one to take it

 

Nikolai grows up to be the best, but he doesn’t grow up good. Nikolai grows up with his hands as red as his hair and his heart as black as ink. Nikolai grows up not throwing punches but dodging them, preferring a sharp knife and a well-placed word to the heavy weaponry he certainly has access to.

Nikolai finishes growing up on a cold, rainy day in St. Petersburg, when he finds trying to kill him, of all people, an American woman with a blond ponytail and a stick of orange gum in her cheek; when he realizes that, of all people, she might actually succeed.

Nikolai does his job for three weeks while the American woman watches, and he’s good enough that he knows she’s there, good enough that she doesn’t get her shot, but not so good that she’s never going to get it, and he knows it. He’s afraid he’s going to die for the first time since he started puberty, and it paradoxically brings him to life, makes him not just the latest treasure of the Red Rooms but a man named Nikolai Romanov.

Later, he understands how good her eye is, that she sees the change, but at the time he just thanks the God he doesn’t believe in when she doesn’t take the shot. The next day there’s another American woman inviting him into the car, a flight across the ocean, and a prison cell that doesn’t lock (because, Matt Hill explains, there’s no point when they know he could break out anyway. Nikolai recognizes this as the intended respect, but also finds it extremely stupid).

 

Thor spends a week hiding in her rooms after the news gets out, and then she walks back out and stands in the hall where the men are drinking.

There’s a silence, for a moment, and then Sif dips her a glass of mead, his black eyes smiling at her as they drink together.

It’s still tense, that first day, but she is still Thor, still a warrior, still the heir, and they remember it before too long.

It is Thor who has difficulty remembering who she is, who seeks out Loki for conversations that make no sense, who prepares to take the throne despite knowing in her heart she isn’t ready and fearing even deeper it’s because her father couldn’t turn her into a man. She proposes the charge on Jotunheim because it’s really what she wants to do, but she won’t take no for an answer only because she needs to be aggressive, needs to fight, needs to slay things and win things and  _earn_  her manhood. (But she invites Loki along anyway, because she will be helpful, and because she loves her.)

 

Bridget goes to medical school, because there’s a part of her that’ll die if she never sees the name Doctor Banner, and there’s a part of her that can’t face being the sort of woman who wants a degree in theoretical physics. Bridget goes to medical school, and she hates it, cries herself not to sleep but to distraction, learns a lot about the human body and even more about Bridget Banner, enough that she quits and goes to take that Ph.D. after all.

That she loves, even if it doesn’t make her love herself, even if it doesn’t end the crying jags and the sick nights when she ends up eating McDonald’s french fries pulled over next to the drive-through because she hasn’t felt up to eating a bite in a couple of days. She hates that she cries—it’s such a girly thing to do, the sort of thing her colleagues would use as another excuse (and they have plenty) to exclude her. At the same time, though, the crying feels good, makes her stronger, and  _stronger_  is what Bridget is coming to realize she wants, what she’s coming to realize everybody wants. Bridget has some thoughts about  _stronger_  actually, some thoughts about the work of a certain Dr. Anna Erskine—who was also girlier than her colleagues would’ve liked, Bridget finds out in her researches. It makes her smile, the way she’s getting to know the wise, funny German woman through her notes. The way she’s getting to know her work just makes her bite her lip and buckle down harder.

 

**3.** **(you know a change is gonna come)**

Tonia’s clothes and nails and cars are alway fire engine red. Not her mouth—lipstick gets in the way of a quick kiss, gets sloppy and sticky all over herself and whatever man she’s with. But otherwise, Tonia is a human racing stripe, a Superman streak across the sky. She dresses as Carmen Sandiego three Halloweens in a row.

Tonia’s mouth is never red, until it’s red with blood, and then suddenly it’s time to maybe slow down a little. She doesn’t, though, couldn’t slow down if her life depended on it. The first thing she does is makes sure the suit banks well, because all she can do is change direction.

The second thing she does is paint the thing red and gold, because god fucking dammit, she is still Tonia Stark. (Tonia Stark, and somebody else as well; “I am Iron Woman,” she says, and she didn’t get to pick her first name either.)

 

Cat and Nikolai go to Bangkok, and Beirut, and Boston. They spar for the first time in the back room of a falafel joint in Haifa, learn how the other takes their coffee on a cold day in Ontario, see each other naked while they share a tent outside of Ascuncion. Cat’s pleased to see he’s no more fussed than she is about that last one; she’s worked with male agents who freaked out when Cat stripped down in front of them, but she has a performer’s lack of modesty and a soldier’s lack of respect for anyone else’s. It’s not as if Nikolai’s suddenly going to decide he wants to fuck her—not that he never has sex, fucks women a lot, actually, but always for business, never for pleasure. On the job, he’s as willing to use sex as Cat is determined not to; afterwards, he’s never shown interest in anyone, and Cat’s happy to pick someone up in a local bar to work off the post-mission emotion. She comes back pleased—Nikolai picked up the expression “cat that got the cream” somewhere, and he teases her. (His own post-sex attitude reminds her more of the variant about the canary.)

 

It hurts.

There’s no getting around that; it hurts.

She would say it doesn’t hurt as much as losing everything, as having to run away, but Bridget’s found herself unable to feel anything in that respect. So the transformation hurts more.

(Actually, no. Knowing that she got it wrong, that the formula she finally thought she understood was  _this_ far off the mark, that’s what hurts the most. But the transformation hurts a lot.)

Bridget’s never been one to make decisions lightly; after this great failure she wouldn’t be stepping near what to heat up for lunch without a pros-and-cons chart penciled in the margins of the notebooks she has left. But she doesn’t feel anything for months (except for horrible, horrible painful nights, when she can feel the insides of her body bursting outward and it  _isn’t even happening_ ; except for disgustingly, pathetically sad sometimes at the sight of a squashed bug or a frowning child; except for confused and afraid, or, no, terrified, actually cold with terror when the bus she’s on swerves a little too dramatically). She doesn’t feel anything for months, except for times that feel like nightmares anyway, and buying a gun doesn’t turn out to be that difficult.

 

 _If he be worthy_ , Thor thinks, and slips into a smirk, because Thor doesn’t cry. “You’re, like, really tall,” the mouthy boy had said, and called her  _Sequoia_ , which was annoying. In retaliation, Thor has forgotten his name. (She knows it’s Darcy, but she’s pretending.)

The other two, the scientists, Jake and Emma, don’t make fun of her, are incredible actually, but she knows that annoying Darcy believes in what she is a lot more than they do, that he may pronounce the name of her hammer wrong on purpose but deep down if she says it’s magic she’ll accept that.

Jake is harder, and more rewarding for it, even if it makes getting Mjolnir back a slower process. It pains her, more deeply than if her father had ordered her arm cut off, because when she let Loki tell she made a promise to herself that she could lose the throne, her friends, her father, but she’d not let them take away her sister or her hammer, one her birthright and one her choice. And now Mjolnir is surrounded by men in suits who she could crush with one hand but won’t (and could she without her weapon?) and Loki sits in Asgard while she is here.

 

**4.** **(assemble!)**

Tonia Stark flexes her fingers and thinks about breaking the wrist of every interviewer who mentions  _girl power_. Cat Barton braids her hair a little tighter and doesn’t cry and doesn’t blame Nikolai for ditching. Thor pretends it doesn’t hurt when they ask about her gender, Bridget covers her chest with crossed arms, and Sadie Rogers smiles and shakes another little girl’s hand and adjusts the name on her uniform.


End file.
